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Happiness surveys can lead to sad: Teitel

There may be some very unpleasant consequences to the abundance of these happiness surveys — namely that policy analysts are beginning to take seriously survey results that are vague and possibly dubious.

Is happiness measured best moment by moment, in individual bursts of elation, or slowly, over a long period of time, writes Emma Teitel. (Rick Madonik / Toronto Star file photo)

The Angus Reid Institute on Monday released the results of a survey quantifying Canadian happiness. The verdict? Of the roughly 1,500 Canadian adults surveyed online in December, 16 per cent said they were “very happy,” 18 per cent said they were “not too happy,” and the majority — 63 per cent — said they were “pretty happy.”

The prevailing result — “pretty happy” — is so Canadian it hurts; a glorified “I guess so,” it suggests that most of us are either too modest to profess our happiness outright, or too polite to despair.

But the result, in true Canadian fashion, is also inherently sensible. It reveals a reluctance to measure in absolute terms a feeling that is forever hard put your finger on. For starters, what is happiness, anyway? And provided that you know what it is, how do you gauge its presence?

Is it measured best moment by moment, in individual bursts of elation, or slowly, over a long period of time? If you’re miserable in January but February is looking up (though it rarely is), are you officially happy, or is your new mood merely a sunny blip in an otherwise blue existence?

Yet, despite the numerous challenges involved in measuring happiness we do it all the time. And we do it in droves. Canadians aren’t the only happy — or “pretty happy” — citizens on the planet. According to another recent study, by polling association WIN Gallup International, Saudi Arabia is the third happiest nation in the world. And Libya — according to yet another happiness index — is the happiest country in Africa.

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The list goes on and on. Happiness surveys and their suspiciously positive results are now more pervasive in the international news cycle than personality quizzes in Cosmopolitan. But there may be some very unpleasant consequences to the abundance of these surveys circulating the globe — namely that policy analysts are beginning to take seriously survey results that are vague and possibly dubious.

For example, happiness indexes are an increasingly popular way by which experts measure a nation’s success (as opposed to, say, looking at its GDP), but this method is inherently flawed. Why?

Mark D. White, chair of philosophy at City University of New York (in a paper on happiness indexes and public policy), writes: “Happiness is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Just like ‘justice’ or ‘beauty,’ happiness is a vague term that means different things to different people; as a consequence, even though everyone knows what it means in various situations, we would be hard-pressed to come up with a single definition that captures all those aspects for every person.”

Happiness for Aristotle, for example, was “the whole aim and end of human existence.” For Sarah McLachlan, “Happiness is like a cloud, if you stare at it long enough, it evaporates.” For me, happiness is a large bag of Jalapeno Jack, Kernels popcorn. In sum: different strokes.

But there’s a far greater danger (beyond imprecise definition) in humanity’s apparent obsession with the Happiness Olympics — the danger of complacency. Happiness surveys, says White, may make “people in First World countries less sympathetic to people who actually need help.”

For example, someone might conclude after hearing that Libya is a generally happy nation (perhaps even as happy as Canada) that the country doesn’t require or deserve aid; that an admission of happiness by a country’s population decreases the perceived severity of the country’s problems. This danger doesn’t merely apply to nations facing mass poverty or political unrest, but to nations like our own.

We know that depression is underreported in Canada — and that suicide may be as well— so what is the purpose of a survey model that suggests to the wider world that things are looking up when in fact they aren’t? The answer is simple: there is none.

Happiness surveys with positive results make for fun, fluffy stories that boost civic pride. But they also foster a culture of complacency and self-deception, in which we ignore our problems and pat ourselves on the back for no good reason. And that is pretty sad.

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